The amount of information a person can access without much effort through the Internet can be overwhelming. Too much information can impede cognition and decision making, just like too little information can. The overwhelming amount of information tends to shorten the attention span to a particular piece of information because the cognitive power of a person did not significantly increase with the amount of accessible information the Internet made available. One effect of the shorter attention span is that a person tends to be more easily distracted. From the perspective of an Internet content provider, the distraction may be that a competitor draws away a person's attention. Therefore, catching a person's attention and generating interest within the shorter attention span helps to gain a competitive edge.
One way to achieve that is selecting and presenting a representative portion related to a content item to a person, in addition to the title of the content item. The representative portion may be referred as a snippet. For example, the snippet may be a portion that conveys the main idea of the content. In another example, in the context of a search, the snippet may be a portion that contains search terms the person used in the search.
Content presented in a browser or an app may be organized in a content stream. A content stream is a popular format especially for news, threads of discussion in online forums, and search results from a search engine. FIG. 1 (Prior Art) illustrates a typical content stream 130. References such as 110 to a series of content items (e.g., titles of a series of articles as hyperlinks) are presented as a list. Some or all of the references are followed by snippets such as 120 selected from or generated based on the content items. A thumbnail picture such as 140 may also be presented adjacent to some or all of the references.
The references and snippets may be selected from the content items. A typical reference to a content item is the title of the content item. A snippet for the content item may be the abstract, subtitle, or keywords of the content item. Due to the usually limited length of the references, the possibility of improving their effectiveness to catch a user's attention is limited. One common technique is to display words in the references as bold texts when those words are among search terms a user used to find the content items the references refer to. For example, in FIG. 2 (Prior Art), a user uses “winter olympics 2014” as a search term 230 to find articles on the Internet related to the Sochi Olympic Winter Games. A reference such as 210 in the content stream including references to articles found by a search engine may have words such as “2014” and “Olympic” displayed in bold because they are among the search terms. The same technique may be applied to snippets. For example, the words “2014,” “Olympic” and “Winter” in snippet 220 are displayed in bold because they are among the search terms.
However, a search term does not always reflect a user's exact intent. For example, a user who searches with a search term “winter olympics 2014” may actually try to find results of a particular competition such as team ice dance. Even if the content item referred by the reference 210 actually includes some results of the team ice dance competition, without the results appearing in the snippet 220, the user has to access the content item to see the results. If the user is busy, he/she may navigate away from the content stream and miss the results.
While a snippet effective to catch one user's attention may not be so effective to catch another user's attention, existing techniques failed to take into consideration characteristics of the user to whom the snippet is selected to be presented. In addition, traditional systems for providing a snippet to a user did not provide a way to ascertain characteristics of the user or establish a link between the user's characteristics and what snippet is effective for her.
Therefore, there is a need to provide a solution for providing a personalized snippet to a user to avoid the above-mentioned drawbacks.